Our Two Brains – The REAL Deal!By Shlomo Maital On the latest Hidden Brain podcast, by Shankar Vedanta, the guest is a psychiatrist and brain researcher, Iain McGilchrist. He speaks about his new book The Master and his Emissary. I plan to read it very soon. There is enormous misleading hype about the left and right brains. Much of it is wrong. McGilchrist’s book is the real deal, and helps us understand our world. The title comes from out an old folk tale. A “master” sends out an emissary to the countryside to gather information. The emissary gathers vast information, and tries to become the master, based on the knowledge he collected. But he cannot. He fails. Because he has only facts, details (left brain/logic), and lacks big picture capability (right brain/holistic thinking). Evolution helped humans survive. To kill and eat prey, we need right-brain big-picture thinking (the forest, trees, rocks, weather, etc.) and crucially need small-picture detailed left brain thinking (the deer is 20 yards to the left of the oak tree and is limping). Of course, most crucial of all is the connecting link between the right and left brain. Weird things happen, McGilchrist explains, when surgery has to sever the nerve path connecting the two brain hemispheres. There is a serious message in the book, way beyond the research findings. McGilchrist argues that increasingly we live in a left-brain logic driven world, based on algorithms and small details. And on short run optimization. What’s best for now. I believe our political system is mainly driven by left brain messages. Note, especially, that the emotion ‘hatred’ and ‘anger’ are actually cross-brain, not solely right brain (where most emotions originate), Many political messages are now focused on hatred, left-brain hatred. “Meaning comes out of having consistent pictures of the world,” McGilchrist told Vedanta, based on knowing our past, not just our own but that of the world, the past of others.” A more right-brain world will focus on the long run, on the big picture, and on our interaction with our planet and with Nature. Now, how in the world do we achieve that? A start, at least, is being aware that there is a right/left brain problem in the world.